Spitting on Veterans

By SETH GITELL
February 6, 2007

Anti-war sentiment is moving dangerously close to a place America must never go — putting our anger on the soldiers that have been fighting the four-year Iraq war.

Some of this takes the form of minimizing what happened the last time American GIs returned from an unpopular war — Vietnam. Liberal commentators, such as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, are diminishing the hostile treatment Vietnam veterans garnered when they returned from Vietnam.

On the air on Thursday, Mr. Olbermann disparaged the old report of Vietnam veterans being spit upon when they came home: "And, oh, by the way, there is not one confirmed case, not one, of Americans spitting on veterans returning from Vietnam."

Washington Post blogger William Arkin, meanwhile, went so far as to lay a condition for America's "support" of veterans. "These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect," Mr. Arkin wrote. "Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order."

Let's state the obvious. First, Mr. Arkin's words are slanderous. To pluralize Abu Ghraib and Haditha and "every rape and murder" is unconscionable. True, there have been some misdeeds, acts as in Vietnam, where there was a William Calley, who was convicted in the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians at the My Lai massacre. But in Vietnam there also was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson who stopped Calley from killing even more innocents. The bulk of the American soldiers cannot be held responsible for the isolated wrong.

And, as for Mr. Olbermann, the point is not whether the social science research collected in Jerry Lembcke's book "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" is correct and that no evidence exists of returning veterans being spit upon, but how most of these men were treated after the war.

In my family, the subject of America's support for returning Vietnam veterans is not an academic one. This past July, I sat down for breakfast with my father and a small group of veterans to talk about that war and its aftermath.

To my left, sat my father, Gerald Gitell, who served as the executive officer of a Special Forces A-Team in Vinh Gia, South Vietnam. He lead irregular Vietnamese forces in combat, worked to win over the native population of fishermen, and risked his life to help bring medical care to civilians when American napalm burned them.

Through a complicated set of circumstances, when he was at Fort Bragg prior to going to Vietnam, he was befriended by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler and helped produce the iconic pro-soldier anthem, "The Ballad of the Green Berets." When he returned, the song had become the number one song in America.

A Boston radio talk show invited him as a guest. Poison and invective came in from one of the callers, "If you weren't killing babies in Vietnam, you'd be killing them here," she hissed. Although she was unable to spit directly on him, the call was the verbal equivalent.

Across the breakfast table from me sat Rudy Loupias. Rudy fought in the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines at Dai Do in 1968. Little known to the public and recognized by historians as the Battle of Dong Ha, this pitched fight saw brutal combat, sometimes hand-to-hand.

The American people were in no mood to support Rudy when he came back from Vietnam. When he returned, he kept his personal history quiet. "I didn't reveal I was a Vietnam veteran because they labeled us as ‘baby killers,'" he recalls. "Even at parties nobody knew I was a Vietnam veteran."

Rudy thinks the public should treat soldiers the way they did after the first Iraq war. "It's too bad you had to feel that way — the hurt," he says. He didn't tell me anything about being spit on, but the pain in his voice says enough.

Health care professionals say that the reception veterans receive when they return from war goes a long way to mitigating problems down the line. The worst thing for soldiers who have just returned from war is to be vilified.

True support for the troops is nonideological and nonpartisan. These men and women have risked everything for us and must not be turned into political pawns. When their tours of duty come to an end and in the many years to come, we must continue to stand by them.